With just more than eight minutes remaining on the clock, the University of Kentucky’s Nerlens Noel chased down Florida guard Mike Rosario and swatted away a fast-break layup attempt. It was Noel’s 106th block of his freshman season at Kentucky. It was also his last. As he returned to the floor, Noel bumped into the basket support, twisted his knee, and collapsed to the floor. His left anterior cruciate ligament was torn, his season — and likely his Kentucky career — ended on a block he never should have made in a game he never should have played.

Noel is only at Kentucky, and only in college, because the National Basketball Association instituted a rule in 2005 requiring all American-born players to be one year removed from high school before they can enter the league’s draft. Nevermind that Noel, the top-ranked player in the high school class of 2012, would have surely been a first-round pick were he eligible last year. Noel wanted to play in the NBA and an NBA team would have gladly accepted his services. He is in college not because he wanted to be, not because of some sense of amateurism or for an education. He is in college because he had to be.

Proponents of the NBA age limit (as well as those who think it should be stronger) argue that it is a good policy because it allows players to mature and improve their games before they jump to the pros. This is nonsense. The age limit exists because NBA teams, some burned by straight-from-high-school prospects that didn’t work out in the past, saw an opportunity to protect themselves against the possibility that the people they pay to scout and draft players aren’t very good at their jobs. Rather than risk millions of dollars on players who entered the draft right out of high school, the NBA now forces those players to perform a one-year trial run in the cost-free minor league that is college basketball.

It is entirely possible that Noel could have suffered the same injury at the professional level, but if he did, he would have already signed a contract and would have a guaranteed paycheck from his NBA team. Instead, he received a scholarship worth comparably little, and though he will still get drafted, the injury could cost him an untold amount of money if his draft stock drops. Even then, he is probably lucky, since an injury that was more likely to threaten his career entirely would have cost him even more.

But while Noel’s injury highlights problems with the limit, what makes it a bad rule is that it is another unnecessary form of restriction on young athletes that doesn’t exist for other workers. Replace Noel with a person with a different skill-set and basketball with a different industry, and no such policy would stand. An 18-year-old computer whizkid with an offer to join Apple is free to take the job. Someone of the same age with a talent for writing who had a job offer from the New York Times has the same opportunity. But because the NBA wants to protect itself from itself, no such chance exists for talented basketball players like Noel, who, even if an NBA team would be willing to pay them to play, are forced to spend one year as indentured servants in a system where everyone — the NCAA, the NBA, and their schools — makes money except them.

The Campaign, which came out last summer, was a sometimes-quite-funny satire of the emptiness of campaign rhetoric and political positions. Will Ferrell starred in that movie, but his endorsement of Eric Garcetti for Los Angles Mayor is actually a much shorter and funnier version of it:

It’s pretty depressing that most of what politicians promise us has the substance of Tuesday waffles—and they have this same level of commitment to actually making Tuesday waffles happen.

This post discusses plot points from the February 12 episode of Justified.

The last two episodes of Justified have been full of advancements in the search for Drew Thompson, the vanished man who holds the key to the arrival of cocaine in Harlan County. But I have to admit, I haven’t been particularly engaged by this season of the show’s central mystery. Instead, my favorite parts of Justified this season have involved an evolving juxtaposition between U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Tim Olyphant) and his oldest friend and enemy, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). The show’s always played with the marginal differences between the two men, contrasting Raylan’s competence with Boyd’s charisma. But now the show is playing with the sense of who’s the good man and who’s the bad one by contrasting their relationships with the women in their lives, Winona, who is pregnant with Raylan’s child, but determined that they can’t make a go of it as a couple, and Ava, who is newly-engaged to Boyd.

In last week’s episode, Raylan simultaneously tried to prove that he could be a responsible figure in Winona and their child’s life, while simultaneously undermining the impression that he was capable of living up to his obligations. When he found out Winona had found a job, Raylan insisted “You don’t have to do that. I’ve been picking up some extra money doing side jobs.” But the side jobs he was doing were under the table, rather than sanctioned by the Marshal Service, and based on events earlier in the season, it’s not exactly clear that Raylan’s going to be able to hold on the money he picks up working on the side, given the general lawlessness of Harlan. Trying to be cute, Raylan told the child “Hey little one, you got to lose the tail. Come out and read about your daddy in the paper.” Winona couldn’t resist pointing out that “this baby lost its tail a little while ago, just so you know.” Raylan tried to defend himself, insisting “I’m a little behind on my homework, but the point is, I’m going to be here for you and the baby.” But it was an idea he immediately proved he can’t live up to, heading off as soon as he got a call from the office, and leaving Winona to her appointment.

Much of what defines Raylan as a Marshal is his competence: he’s cool in a standoff, knows how to shoot out an airbag to distract a suspect, has a good sense of what pressure points to put on a teenage girl run wild. But knowing how to fire a gun and being possessed of the confidence to insist on the correctness of your decisions isn’t the same thing as being a partner or a father. Raylan’s pulled to a sphere where his knowledge is useful and his decision-making is central, where his partners largely defer to him, and he’s familiar with the processes that arbitrate his decisions that are judged to be bad. Parenthood and relationship-building offer him none of those consolations or escape hatches—they’re roles that require compromise, sitting around and listening, accepting that someone else’s experiences and interpretations of events take precedence over your own.
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The bridge is yours.

-Nate Silver-ing the Oscars.

-Why the mockumentary format has replaced the laugh track.

-Netflix is investing in children’s programming.

-Asian pop music gets tied up in regional geopolitics.

-Geeky Valentine’s Day Gifts.

In a fairly predictable cycle of events, DC Comics has hired Orson Scott Card to write Adventures of Superman, and large segments of the internet are displeased. As Comic Book Resources reports:

An online petition calling on the publisher to drop the “virulently anti-gay writer” has already drawn more than 4,800 signers. And while comic book fans and petitions seem to go hand in hand — it was just last month Marvel was being called upon to cancel Avengers Arena – this effort is being spearheaded by All Out, an initiative of the Purpose Foundation advocating for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. The drive has already attracted the attention of mainstream media outlets like The Guardian and The Huffington Post.

Although Card is best known for his award-winning 1985 novel Ender’s Game, he has become notorious for outspoken views on homosexuality and his advocacy against gay rights. A board member of the National Organization for Marriage, a group dedicated to the opposition of same-sex marriage, the author has tried to link homosexuality to childhood molestation, advocated home-schooling to ensure children “are not propagandized with the ‘normality’ of ‘gay marriage’” (with Card, the phrase is always in quotation marks), and floated slippery-slope scenarios in which marriage-equality opponents one day will be classified as “mentally ill” and parents who encourage their children to pursue heterosexual marriage “will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech.”

I’m of two minds about the petition. As much as I find Card’s views abhorrent, I do believe that he has a right to work, which of course is not the same thing as a requirement that anyone hire him. And I think it would be worrisome to set a precedent that political views which are unrelated to the content of a person’s job should be the grounds for firing them—obviously, Card’s views on homosexuality and gay rights would be a reason not to, say, put him in a position to make benefits determinations for gay families, or to decide whether or not to prosecute hate crimes. Now, obviously Card’s views have affected some of his creative output, and I’d be willing to listen to an argument that they affect even his works that aren’t primarily concerned with adult sexuality (though I think it would be a very heavy lift to convince me that Ender’s Game and Speaker For The Dead, as stand-alone books, are noxious works).

The really interesting question for me is who else other than Card DC considered to write Superman, and why Card’s pitch, whatever it was, stood out to the company. Card seems to me to be someone who has been coasting creatively on the reputation of Ender’s Game for an extremely long time, rather than a genuinely exciting active talent. But I wouldn’t be surprised if DC went with him because, if nothing else, he’s a recognizable brand name. That’s a kind of hiring laziness that is infuriating, particularly when, as Joseph Hughes wrote in a great piece at Comics Alliance earlier this month that inspired predictable-but-still-depressing hysteria, “There is currently not a single black writer working on a monthly series for either of the two biggest comic book publishers in the United States, and precious few working for any of the others.” Hiring a white, once-innovative writer whose attitudes both offend potential readers in general, and have the potential to seep into his work in a way that makes it deeply unappealing, is apparently still more attractive to DC Comics than seeking out a new and refreshing voice, no matter what body that voice is housed in.

Over at Time, James Poniewozik has a smart piece about the rebranding of G4, the video gaming channel owned by NBC Universal, into the Esquire Network:

Spike’s sensibility was more along the lines of Maxim–gadgets-and-girls-oriented magazines whose philosophy was not that men needed a magazine to make them better but that they were already good enough. Spike has dropped the “TV for men” branding over the years, though it still has MMA fighting and a logo that could serve well as a label for men’s body spray. (It also airs the brilliant reality-TV parody The Joe Schmo Show, which among other things is as good a spoof of reality-TV dudeliness as anything.)…

But NBCU must think the Esquire brand has some value to the channel—that a certain breed of upscale male viewer will see it as promising the kind of avuncular man’s-guide-to-life service that the magazine serves up alongside its long news features and the Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman column. Will there be shows about buying the perfect tux? On mixing Hemingway’s favorite cocktail?

So far, the few announced series include Knife Fight, a competition among young chefs, and a travel show called The Getaway. Cooking, travel—those sound like things that could appeal to a certain breed of demographically attractive, metrosexual men, and things that the rest of the cable universe kind of provides already, no?

Part of the interesting question in trying to do programming for men is how you’re defining them. When people talk about trying to lock down male viewers, some of the implication is that they’re looking for heterosexual men, rather than reaching out to gay men, because the assumption is that wealthy (read: desirable) gay men already have all of their needs met by Andy Cohen’s fabulous meanness over on Bravo. Picking Esquire as a branding partner also assumes that NBC Universal is going after a certain subset of heterosexual men, the kind who watch Top Chef, rather than the ones who are tuning in to Duck Dynasty and NFL games.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it also seems like an inherently limited strategy. FX, one of the networks that’s oriented towards men, at least to the extent that it’s the rare channel where more men than women tune into its dramas, has built its brand in part by putting lots of different kinds of men in primetime, from ne’er-do-wells running a bar in Philly, to biker dudes in California, to middle-class football fans and their families, to super-spies with a twist. It’s a strategy that means that you can pull in audiences who are both eager to see exaggerated riffs on themselves on screen, and people who are eager to disappear into fantasies that have nothing to do with their lives. In general, trying to reach different kinds of men also means trying to catch men who watch television many different ways. Trying to lure young, tech-savvy viewers who are watching DVRed television or streaming shows online back to your network simply by giving them more content you think might like, and programming very narrowly to what you think their tastes are, seems like something of a fool’s errand.

And really, I think that attempt to narrowcast presents problems beyond the technological ones. What of Esquire‘s brand is translatable into narrative? If it’s pseudo-intellectual justifications for drooling over hot women, that wouldn’t necessarily make it much different from Spike’s or Maxim‘s. Some of its reported features could make good movie or mini-series adaptations, but those are expensive, hard to syndicate, and magazine stories are adapted into movies less often that the development deals places like New York and The Atlantic have in place would suggest. In other words, Esquire‘s brand is transitional enough even as a magazine. Trying to import it wholesale, rather than developing an identity through programming, seems like a way to try to grab a new audience on the quick and cheap, rather than trying to figure out what works, and to learn who your audience is, rather than to dream of who it might be.